COUNTRY FOCUS: UK
Prevention not cures
The ability to look at diverse data sets,
including sensitive patient data, could unleash
a revolution in healthcare enabling advanced
preventative medicine.
At the moment, it’s estimated that
as much as 85% of actionable health
information is stored in a free-text
narrative. These tend to be comprised
of records containing key contextual
information such as detailed symptom
profiles and personalised treatment plans,
as well as patients’ personal risk factors,
ranging from relatively basic framing
information to somewhat extensive
narratives when it comes to mental health
and social care records.
However, the text in medical records is often
entirely removed before records are made
available for research purposes due to the
privacy issues, leaving a potentially rich
source of data entirely untapped.
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Taking into account what the NHS already
knows about its patients and adding
it to other data such as that from the
increasing adoption of wearable tech, we
are approaching the point of being able to
identify possible health scares for citizens
with a considerable level of accuracy. The
impact on the population and possible
cost savings for the ever-strained NHS
are considerable.
This potential impact was underlined
during the launch of current health
secretary, Matt Hancock’s policy paper,
The Future of Healthcare, assessing the
technological transformation needed to
rid the health service of its abundance of
outdated legacy systems. The statement
outlines plans to introduce a minimum
technical standard for IT systems and
digital infrastructure. The initiation of
these measures will, for the first time in
the past decade, put security and ubiquity
at the forefront of the health and social
care system.
Speaking on its potential impact, Sarah
Wilkinson, Chief Executive at NHS Digital,
asserts that the overall effect this will have
is the immediacy at which patients are
treated. She said: “Greater standardisation
of data, infrastructure, platforms and APIs
will create a health and care system that is
more joined-up and as a result, safer and
more efficient.
“Connected systems ensure that clinicians
have immediate access to all relevant and
appropriate patient data from all care
providers and settings and ensure that data
is communicated between systems with
absolute fidelity, eliminating misinformation
and misunderstandings.”
There is so much value to be gleaned from
the vast amounts of data that the public
sector holds that could have an incredibly
positive societal impact. This is all just
the tip of an enormous iceberg that is
increasingly visible thanks to new sovereign
public cloud technologies. n
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